When we first came to the Grove, we found a pile of doors under the back porch. They’d been taken out of their doorframes in the house and stashed away, atop a muddy pile of shutters and rotten floorboards. I was shocked that they weren’t destroyed by termites, but I guess old lead paint is pretty resilient. That’s probably why lead was used to make paint for so long. Seems to be good stuff... just don’t eat it... or breathe it...
The day night we got the keys to the house, I enlisted my poor wife to haul this pile of doors out from its muddy resting place. I was convinced the termites had been waiting for the exact moment we moved in to start gnawing on them and didn’t want to take any chances.
These doors are HEAVY-- made of dense heart pine (more on this later). Dragging them out from under the porch and into the shed was not easy, but definitely worth it in the name of preservation (so I told my patient wife). Unfortunately, the paint was badly peeling, so it had to go. That first picture actually shows the “good” side of the “cleanest” door...the others were much worse. Like big, flat alligators--all scaly and mean looking.
All these pictures are the same door. A few test areas revealed a faux woodgrain paint scheme underneath all those layers of green, white, and drab. The faux painting was probably meant to simulate an expensive exotic wood (like mahogany or rosewood) and would’ve been varnished to appear glossy and polished. Sadly, this paint was damaged and coming off just like all the other layers, so I wasn’t able to save it. I’ll do my best to replicate it instead. The Grove is a late eighteenth-century house. In the eighteenth century, pine woodwork was almost always painted. I’m not a complete purist when it comes to restoration, but I’m not going to leave these doors bare. Just wouldn’t look right. It’s lovely wood, true, but such surfaces were never intended to be left unpainted.
That’s one of the things when it comes to preservation...tradeoffs. Removing the paint was a tradeoff. I lost some history of the house’s evolution by stripping it. Yes, I could’ve maybe found a way to stabilize the old paint, or potentially spent a dozen years scraping it down with a scalpel on nights and weekends to get to the base layer...but we need doors in the house, and using the original doors is the only good option. (Also, the best option in my opinion.) As a compromise between preservation and practicality, I’m stripping and repainting the doors in a period-appropriate style. But, I am leaving some small areas with the original paint layers intact. That way these pieces of the house’s original fabric are saved and returned to their places with some traceable evidence of their history. That’s better than laying in a pile under a porch.
Next steps are to finish stripping off the old paint, clean up the surfaces, and re-paint appropriately.
A couple things I’ve learned thus far:
0. ALWAYS test for lead paint. If it’s lead, don’t use a heat gun and be really careful about generating dust. Look up the rules/best practices for lead and follow them.
1. Citristrip and pretty much all other products do almost nothing to 8+ layers of 200-year-old lead paint. They’ll destroy some modern latex, but they didn’t do anything on these doors except create a wet, gummy, gross mess.
2. The best paint stripper for thick old paint is DUMOND 1005N Peel Away. It’s not cheap, but less than a gallon of it did more work than 4+ gallons of Citristrip and whoever knows what other stripping products I tried. Also, it keeps the paint damp so less lead dust to worry about (that means it’s safer).
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